Training and Educating: A Critique of Technical-Mindedness in Teacher Preparation

TRAINING AND EDUCATING A CRITIQUE OF TECHNICAL-MINDEDNESS IN TEACHER PREPARATION Landon Beyer Knox College The last five years have witnessed a resurgence of concern about the quality of education in the United States. In part due to perceived declines in economic, military, and social strength and vitality, and in part because of "internal" criticisms of teachers, administrators, and parents , the public schools are once again the topic of frequent commentary. Teachers have often been identified as the primary cause of the current "crisis" and a number of proposals have been made to "professionalize" teachers, as a key to the reform of education. These include recommendations to make the requirements for admission to teacher education programs more demanding; lengthening the time required to complete such programs; mandating graduate level education programs exclusively; instituting merit pay plans for practicing teachers to reward the most productive; developing career ladders within schools so that a more differentiated pattern of staffing can be created; and instituting more comprehensive programs of evaluation and supervision of practicing teachers.^ The focus on teachers as the key to school reform has a plausible ring to it, and surely teachers are crucial for the improvement of teaching and curriculum offerings. Yet an isolating focus on teachers, together with an essentially technical focus on teacher preparation, constricts school reform efforts. Such an approach frequently places the blame on those whose professional decisions are shaped by larger patterns and expectations that need to be seriously analyzed in considering reform possibilities. By holding teachers responsible for inadequacies that frequently have their 21 origins outside the classroom and the school, we misunderstand both the dynamics of teaching and what is required in teacher preparation programs. To understand the predicaments of teaching within a broader context, this essay is dedicated to going beyond the usual technical framework in teacher preparation. More specifically, I argue against the separation of educational studies and teacher preparation from liberal learning, of theory from practice within programs that prepare future teachers; and for a conception of teaching as moral, personal, and social praxis. A key argument in this regard is that, as people who shape students' consciousness, personal and communal identity, and social relationships, teachers do not just judge achievement, estimate socialization, and gauge how learning is proceeding in the various forms of knowledge thought appropriate, but they also help generate individuals and the social, political, and economic situations in which they will live. The issues I will be discussing are, of course, not new. Historically , the fusing of school and teacher preparation reforms has ample precedents. Indeed the beginning of the common school movement in the United States was closely allied with the provision for teacher training on behalf of aspiring teachers through the creation of normal schools. Horace Mann was a primary force behind both efforts, arguing that normal schools have historic importance as they form, a new instrumentality of the race. . . . Neither the art of printing, nor the trial by jury, nor a free press, nor a free suffrage can long exist to any beneficial and salutary purpose without schools for the training of teachers.^ The term "normal school" was formally adopted by the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1838, and the first schools for the training of teachers were established by that state one year later.3 The training of 22 prospective teachers in the upper division classes of high schools was still in evidence, however, at the same time that efforts to provide systematic instruction for prospective teachers were undertaken in normal schools. It was not until after 1860 that normal schools proliferated, making professional preparation an increasingly common expectation. A basic conflict could be seen in the operation of normal schools--one that continued even after their elimination. The rift between "scholars" and "schoolmen" (or advocates of professional preparation) reflects deeper divisions between "pure" versus "applied" areas of study.^ Posing two of the simplest questions: Are the aims of higher education compatible with the goals of professional preparation? How different are these activities? The literature on teacher preparation, as perhaps the most applied wing of educational studies, has generally promoted the demarcation of theory and practice in promoting a technical rationality for...